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Thursday, 21 February 2013

In one week, I have
written nothing and a lot has happened since I penned the piece about My Funny
Valentine in the earnest desire for love, company and companionship.

However, as we woke
into the morning of St. Valentine’s Day of the year 2013, 4 shots reverberated
round the world as it became an echo chamber of a tragedy that still leaves
many in shock but worse still, the irreparable losses, the loss of freedoms to
love, to live and to roam – it is all too sad.

She started the
night before in the arms of her love and by daybreak she was in the arms of her
Lord, the whole episode unfolding like a horrific thriller with both entombed
in the ground and in a cell, the former we must never forget for the enduring glory
of the latter.

Guns with irrational backbone

One cannot comment
on the specifics of the case but one thing is evident, regardless of the status
of whoever was caught enclosed and defenceless in that place, that person would
have ended up dead, be the person an intruder or a lover and that for me is
unacceptable aggression in the face of somewhat irrational fear predicated on
the assumed extreme vulnerability of the perpetrator.

Guns appear to give
people an unusual sense of bravado and daring where other defence mechanisms to
seek help or flee, and I mean flee will kick in.

Four gunshots was
four gun shots too many, too determined, too irrational, too demonstrative, too
controlling and too self-assured of dealing with a situation. We may never know
the mind of the how and why but result is devastating enough that the absence
of a sense of great remorse of what was essentially avoidable will never be
acceptable.

My sympathies are with the victim, totally

One must not stand
to judge, but between the extremes of the benign of the fear of an assumed
intruder and it must be clear that this was not fighting off an intruder and
the unfortunate pall of spousal abuse resulting in a fatality all too common in
many places around the world, my sympathies are squarely with the victim
regardless of provocation; no non-aggressive provocation where the other party
does not present an existential threat to life should have anyone ending up in
the morgue.

The circus of love
ended on Valentine’s Day and what we have now for entertainment is the circus
of the macabre, it is almost as unwatchable as it is reprehensible as the media
feeding frenzy has settled down south on a basic gavel hearing that has now
stretched into the fourth day.

For all the
accolades, glory and heroic feats of determination and achievement that dogs
the principal and masks his attendant foibles, weaknesses and shortcomings, none
of which must be discounted with the flippant wave of the hand, my thoughts, my
pains and my heartache are with Reeva Steenkamp, her bereaved family, the death
of the life force of an amazing dream and the many partners who have by
pre-meditation or inadvertently fallen at the hands of the person they chose to
love.